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I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

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Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#761

Post by Hallucinaut »

danlugo92 wrote: post #606
beambot wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate informed discussion about bitcoin & nuclear, as both topics are highly relevant to the technical, business, and hacker roots of HN. They seem distinctly different from, say, "anglocentrism" @dang was calling out.

> discussion There's no such thing as fair discussion about those topics here.

What does "fair" mean in this usage? If it means one position attracts a lopsided balance of comments either for or against then surely that's always going to be the case?

Otherwise what is your proposition, don't state any opinion unless you find a counter opinion commenter to match with?

Lots of folk here are pro-privacy and lots of folk are anti-bitcoin (and some of them will be the latter because they're the former) so I don't understand how you'd extended your position in a way that leaves HN with any value.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#762

Post by acquacow »

simonblack wrote: post #679
tech2 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early on in my Linux-using-life I made the mistake of deleting /etc. That was a learning experience like no other :)

A couple of weeks after moving to UNIX from MSDOS, I thought I'd remove lots of unnecessary 'dot-directories' from the /tmp directory. I was root as I had no concept of being a 'normal user'. So I ran two simple commands: cd /tmp rm -fr .* and wondered why it was taking so long.

I did that on my NAS a few years ago. I had copied in a bunch of directories from a mac and they all had tons of dot files in each dir that were showing up on my windows machines. I popped open a terminal and did the exact same thing and wiped most of the NAS out =P Good thing I had it mirrored with my other synology.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#763

Post by mananaysiempre »

nobody9999 wrote: post #732
mananaysiempre wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard is, indeed, excessively vague because it was written to let many existing implementations be conformant as is, though I’d say it’s still more helpful than many other standards with that deficiency. There’s a method to it, however: - Things installed in /, if it’s different from / usr , are generally not to be touched; - Things installed in / usr are under the distro’s purview or otherwise under a package…

>the original separation of / and /usr happened for intensely silly reasons As I recall, there were very good reasons for separating / and /usr (as well as /home and /var). The biggest one was that various Unix kernels would panic[0] if / was full. But that issue was almost universally fixed by 1990 or so. And netmounts of pretty much everything other than / were pretty common for many years, due to the high cost of…

OK, I didn’t put this completely correctly. The original separation of /usr to hold user home directories (!) and / to hold everything else was because the first RK05 disk ran out, but it makes sense in any case. The additional hierarchy under /usr was created some time later when space on the first RK05 disk ran out again, and while this can be a perfectly sensible decision for a single installation on a single site, taking it seriously decades later is silly. Neither does that mean that there weren’t good reasons the split got preserved in subsequent systems, just that they couldn’t have been the same as the original ones; there are no netmounts in V6, after all.

(I have an old Unix intro book that describes /usr as user home directories, the rest is a second-hand retelling[1].)

[1] http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#764

Post by xeyownt »

johnlorentzson wrote: post #750
lillecarl wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'm a fan of the capitalization and spaces, other than that I'm all for more self-explanatory names.

Why not? That's how proper English text is written. Of course there are many programs that can't handle it properly (or handles it inconveniently) so in practice it might be problematic at times, but otherwise I see nothing wrong with it.

Why compare with English? It's computer domain, it's not a book or a poem. It should be clear and unambiguous.

Caps are annoying to type, and difficult to remember (Do You Caps, or Do you caps, or DO YOU CAPS, etc).

Spaces are nuisances that bring no benefit. At best we should use non-breaking space for filenames, but that would be even more atrocious.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#765

Post by pseingatl »

You need them for URL's. Running a stand-alone web page maker using Rust. Document structure:

    [Introduction](./Introduction.md)\\
    [Chapter One](./chapter one.md)\\
Crashed on trying to deal with building html when there are spaces in the file name. It is still an issue.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#766

Post by dr-detroit »

vesinisa wrote: post #633
alpaca128 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like MS had the same idea according to an answer in the link: > Microsoft intentionally made programs install to C:\Program Files on Windows 95+ to force programmers to deal with spaces in filenames.

Except for programs that were too old / obscure to fix I guess. I think at least the Symbian Development Kit was such that builds would fail with strange errors unless you installed it in any other path than the default immediate subdirectory of C:\, let alone under "Program Files".

Plenty of new stuff does this. As long as youre not .net or javascript nobody scrutinizes the trash work developers charge money for.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#767

Post by account42 »

dwheeler wrote: post #323
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah. it's a string.

On POSIX systems file names are not strings, they are sequences of bytes. They might not be UTF-8 or have any meaning. Python3 had to hack around this, they thought they could force everything to Unicode and discovered that doesn't work.

On POSIX system file paths are C strings, which are sequences of bytes that cannot include the 0 character. UTF-8 or oher meaning is not required for something to be a string.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#769

Post by account42 »

ansible wrote: post #287
foxfluff wrote: post #17

I'm hardly afraid but I just think it's poor ergonomics. Same as the move from xset m 0 0 to xinput --set-prop 'pointer:Logitech USB Receiver' 'libinput Accel Profile Enabled' 0, 1 Everything seems to be going this way in Linux land. Longer names, harder to type names, camelcase names, spaces... I'm looking forward to an OS that treats command line ergonomics as a first class feature and where camelcase & spaces are…

Well, if you think that's bad, behold the recent trend in network interface names on Linux. We started out with 'eth0', 'eth1', etc. Which adapter was which could change when adding and removing a network card. That was bad, so that prompted the evolution. Now we have 'enp1s0', 'enp0s31f6', 'enp13s0' and many similar variations. These are supposedly more stable across device changes. As it turns out, it wasn't. But w…

If netwok interfaces were files we could just have both short names and stable names, like what we have for block devices.

Re: I'm “still afraid to use spaces in file names” years old

#770

Post by bborud »

vertere wrote: post #659
bborud wrote: post #426

Not obeying the "Robustness Principle" in software is just poor engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

Definitely applicable here. There's no way we're going to eliminate all problems with spaces etc, so why invite trouble. I wouldn't say it's always poor engineering though, especially the 'liberal in what you accept' half.

Yes, you have a point there, but in this case would being liberal in what you accept be to accept filenames with spaces or (arguably) doing filename handling correctly (ie accept filenames with spaces)?
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